I mispoke. They don't have to connect; though such a connection could be involved in their upconversion capability in the future; though admittedly this is mere speculation. Clearly Toshiba wants to include internet connectivity with the future capability of DVD players. See: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38204/97/
The great irony in this whole thing is that Toshiba's plans for super upconversion depend upon the use of the cell processor-based "Spurs Engine" -- the same type that is currently used in the Sony PS3, which was directly responsible for the demise of HD-DVD! If you want to see an example of what it can do, check out these before and after images: http://64.233.179.104/translate_c?hl.../23/21296.html
Honestly, I don't understand why people get upset with Toshiba for wanting to try a new technology. The more new technologies companies invest research in the better for the consumer. They are not "sore losers", they have made a calculated business decision which may or may not pay off. Either way consumers will benefit in the long run. This is called "free market" economics.

That is correct; and legacy DVD's are actually encoded in only 480i, so "progressive scan" players are already upconverting (deinterlacing) to generate the 480p output.

Just a FYI,

DVDs are encoded by "field" rather than by "frame", so in one sense progressive-scan DVD players do need to do a little bit of work to recombine the proper pair of fields back into a complete frames. And there are different ways of doing this (reading flags to instruct you as to which fields go together, or analyzing a series of fields to determine the cadence). But when done properly, you get back the *real* actual original progressive frame that is identical to the frame before it was split into fields.

This is only true of native "frame" based video images like those derived from film. Native 480i signals, like from standard-def video cameras, are inherently 480i because there are no "pairs" of fields that make up a compete frame... each field was recorded 1-60th of a second apart from the one that came before. So when you "deinterlace" raw interlaced video material, you *are* indeed interpolating to fill in the missing lines.

But when you deinterlace native progressive material, even when it's been split into fields as is the case on DVD, you don't interpolate at all... you recombine and get back the frame you started with.

DaViD,
NTSC is based on a 525-line, 60 fields/30 frames-per-second, at 60Hz system for transmission and display of video images. This is an interlaced system in which each frame is scanned in two fields of 262 lines, which is then combined to display a frame of video with 525 scan lines. NTSC is the official analog video standard in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, some parts of Central and South America, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC
Since NTSC is inherently an interlaced system (in fact, so are PAL and SECAM for that matter), since most displays were interlaced when DVDs came out, I assumed that all commercially made DVD movies were also based on interlaced video. Now, of course, many newer displays are natively progressive scan, as well as many newer DVD players; but I didn't know that they started making DVDs from progressive video, (though I admit it would now make sense to do so). Are you aware of any commercial DVD releases of progressive video? Or are you merely suggesting that it is a theoretical possibility?

film-based DVDs aren't native NTSC... they use a process called "3-2 pulldown" to take the 24 frame-per-second film progressive signal and "spread" it out to fall neatly into a 60-field-per-second NTSC signal. This is accomplished by splitting each frame in half into fields (gives you 48 fields per second), and then repeating the fields in a 3-2 pattern so they fill the "60 fields per second" slots without the need to speed up or slow down the film.

HOWEVER,

this is completely different than native NTSC video which is simply raw 60 field-per-second interlaced.

I explain this difference in my original post. The different is meaningful because the *complete and original progressive frames* can be completely and accurately recovered from film material that's been "spread" into the 480i NTSC system via 3-2 pulldown.

Hence, there's no "scaling" or "interpolating" involved in generating a 480p output from film that's been encoded in 480i form as all the original data is present and merely needs to be properly identified and recombined back into the source frames.

This is fundamentally different from making a 480p signal out of *real* 480i which nececitates interpolation since each 60th of a second represents a new instance in time, and so there's nothing to zip back together (ie, there's no progresse, frame content burried in the 480i signal of an actual NTSC video image).

Do a little googling about film and 3-2 pulldown to get a better idea.

Quote:

Now, of course, many newer displays are natively progressive scan, as well as many newer DVD players; but I didn't know that they started making DVDs from progressive video, (though I admit it would now make sense to do so). Are you aware of any commercial DVD releases of progressive video? Or are you merely suggesting that it is a theoretical possibility?

Since day one, DVDs have been "flagged" so that, in theory, the fields that represent the original frame pairs are identified to make it easy for any player to simply zip them back together to produce a progressive-scan output... which one could argue is tantamount to a "progressive-scan encoded DVD". Again, this has been true since 1997.

However, there's no enforced quality control to this flagging and so many DVDs are improperly flagged (ie, have the wrong fields tagged as going together). Some progressive-san DVD players use flag info to produce the progressive output, as you might imagine, and in cases with improperly authored DVDs with bad flags the result is really bad combing.

The best progressive scan DVD players employ analytical algorithms to watch the 60-field-per-second signal generated by the MPEG2 decoder (most MPEG 2 decoders are "hard wired" to produce 480i) and when it sees the 3-2 field pattern it recognizes the signal as a "film" signal and folds the proper fields back into frames... with no loss.

This is called "3-2 pulldown reversal" and I'm sure you've heard of that in conjunction with progressive-scan processing.

With film based material that starts life as 24 frames per second, applying 3-2 pulldown reversal to recover the progressive image from an NTSC signal is a lossless process.

DaViD,
It seems like we are in agreement then that regardless of whether the DVD content was originally shot on film or video, the resulting fields are interlaced. Your only point seems to be that the process of recombining the interlaced fields to produce progressive output (deinterlacing) doesn't lose any information. I see your point, there is no interpolation or scaling or anything else involved. And it should not produce artifacts, if done correctly. That is a very good point. Well taken. It is not directly in disagreement with anything I previously said, since I didn't say anything about whether information was lost or added in the deinterlacing step, only that an extra step was involved. Still, I guess you're right if you mean to say that ouputing the same information in a different way can not really be called "upconverting", since, after all, it is still the same information. And clearly the result will be the same whether the player does the deinterlacing or the display does it. As long as they both perform the deinterlacing correctly the final result should be identical either way.
On the other hand, when the source material was originally 60i, you can't just combine two adjacent interlaced fields since they were taken at different points in time, and would not mesh well if there was rapid movement during that 1/60th of a second. In that case the player really does have to interpolate to fill in the missing alternate lines of information. So, then it would be completely correct to say that in this case the "progressive scan" player really "upconverts"? In the case of 60i video the player has to "fill" the physical space by interpolation. In the case of the 24fps film, the player has to "fill" the temporal space, which is done by repetition, 3:2 cadence. Have I understood you correctly? Thanks again for the explanation.